Special report: Advertising and technology

This week's Economist newspaper has a long and detailed special report on advertising and technology. It goes into great detail about how marketing people collect personal information from web surfers and from users of mobile apps.

Most of us here are probably familiar with the general concepts involved, but the sheer scale of it might come as a surprise. If you are at all interested in this - whether from a marketing viewpoint or one of personal privacy - I recommend that you read the whole thing.

(I don't how long the report will remain available on their site. If you are really interested, you might prefer to purchase the issue in question from the Amazon Kindle store.)

Tracking is getting silly now. On some sites there are over a thousand companies tracking you! Each time one of them adds a new "attribute" to their profile of me I feel I've lost a piece of my soul. It's been estimated that every year we give Google alone $1,000 worth of free information about ourselves. I dread to think what the figure is for Facebook and their ilk!

Ad blocking software hurts publishers, but I'm finding it difficult to use the web without Ghostery. There are all kinds of games you can play with these trackers. You can edit your hosts file, use TOR's version of Firefox or, if enough web users get together, it would be possible to so completely confuse these databases that they become useless (I'd like to spoof more than just user agent). However, I don't see that happening as most people seem to like "targeted" ads!